An old man's 3D printing thoughts, ideas, experiments, etc

Tag: Multi colour printing

Well the first stage of testing went exactly as expected – very little gained in terms of progress, but very much gained in terms of knowledge. Or using my analogy of a journey, I took a few steps up a hill but came tumbling back down. But now I have a better map, so I […]

Warning – this will be a long post (but hopefully worth reading) Introduction I guess the time has now arrived for me to share what I have been working on for the past 8 months or so. As the title of this post indicates, I’m attempting to design a new hot end. Although I have […]

Around about this time last year, I was making a start on upgrading my printer to use a five colour Diamond hot end, in preparation for the TCT show. The upgrade itself went fine but I had problems printing five coloured objects. Specifically, the scaled up version of Aria by Loubie that I’ve talked about […]

Following my extreme retraction torture tests, I decided to upgrade my printer from using E3D Titan extruders to BondTech BMGs (five of them). This was quite a major job for many reasons and because………..well, on the basis that a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video must be worth more, so in the […]

This was my original method for holding filament Essentially two lengths of 2020 vslot extrusion spanning the width of the printer. Cylindrical adaptors (printed parts) of about 45mm diameter with a square hole right through the middle and with flanges at one end, were slid over the rods. Filament was loaded by sliding the reels […]

While exploring other things I was looking closely at gcode files and it occurred to me that extruder moves can be really tiny. Of course it’s obvious but it’s not something that I had given much thought to. A 300mm move in X generally has an extrusion amount associated with it in the order of […]

Introduction. As readers of this blog will know, I use a Diamond mixing hot end. For retraction to work with a mixing hot end, it is necessary to retract all loaded filaments concurrently. If just a single filament is retracted, then all that happens is that molten filament is drawn from one or more of […]